If you want to send serial emails, you can create them either directly with SoSci Survey or with an external program. This tutorial is about how to create serial emails with such an external program. For an overview see Send Mailings.
There are several programs for sending serial mails, e.g. Newsletter Genius or SuperMailer, for Thunderbird there are plugins for sending serial mails (e.g Mail Merge or Mail Tweak) and even Outlook can send serial mails in combination with Word. Instructions for this can be found on the Internet.
If you want to send the invitations in an external program, you can either send the link to the questionnaire without any further information or personalize it using a serial number. Personalized links allow…
Via Invitations Mailings → Access URLs you can create links that work in the same way as the links in serial emails. These can be restricted to a specific questionnaire and (depending on your needs) allow multiple participation or not.
Set Mailing as access restriction in the questionnaire so that the participation links work as intended, and third parties cannot access the questionnaire.
With this variant, it is not (!) traceable based on the data set to which participation link a questionnaire belongs. This can be advantageous if the data is to be collected anonymously.
You can determine the participation status for the participation links during or after the survey. To do this, download the list of participation links again under Invitation mailings → Access URLs → URL Lists. The participation status is shown in the column Status, the codes correspond to those for serial e-mails (Download e-mail distribution lists), whereby it is not possible to differentiate between 0 (not sent) and 1 (sent but not clicked) for participation links.
For a personalized mailing, create the necessary number of valid serial numbers under Invitation mailings → Authorization Codes → Management . You can then assign these to the participants (e.g. in a spreadsheet) and include them in the questionnaire link in the e-mail (URL to the Questionnaire).
Set Authorization code as access restriction in the questionnaire so that each participant can only fill out the questionnaire exactly once with their serial number.
Important: The serial number is stored directly in the data set (variable SERIAL). Since you have to assign the serial numbers manually to participants, it is your responsibility to manage the affiliation of participants (names/email addresses) and serial numbers (data records). Depending on organizational measures, you work with personal or pseudonymous data. This means that you have to comply with a number of requirements of the DSGVO.
Serial numbers are beneficial if you do not want to send emails via SoSci Survey but use an external program. Serial numbers serve two functions:
It makes no difference if you create the serial numbers yourself and tell SoSci Survey under Authorization Codes Management or if SoSci Survey creates valid serial numbers (under the same menu item). The serial number can be given to the participant either directly in the link to the questionnaire or – especially useful for postal invitations – in the text. f a questionnaire with an access restriction “Authorization code” is called up without a serial number in the link, the questionnaire will ask for it.
If you want to conduct multi-wave surveys with serial numbers, you will encounter a small hurdle: The participant is told the same serial number (the records are supposed to be matched, after all) and therefore can only continue the interview from the first time. The solution is banal: Under Authorization Codes Management there is a button reset response status. After that, each serial number starts a new interview.